Prospects for the Study of Event-by-Event Fluctuations and Strangeness Production with the MPD Detector at NICA

Abstract

The future heavy-ion NICA collider (JINR, Dubna) will provide a variety of beam types with the range of collision energies from 4 to 11A GeV. New experimental data on event-by-event fluctuations and strangeness production allow addressing important QCD properties such as nature of deconfinement phase transition and the existence of the Critical End Point (CEP). Heavy-ion collisions at NICA will be measured with the multi-purpose detector—MPD, which provides precise reconstruction of multiple physics channels. NICA physics goals and the MPD concept are described with the emphasis on the detector performance in the study of the excitation function for high order moments of net-proton event-by-event multiplicity distributions. The results of a feasibility study for measuring at NICA spectra and yields of kaons and pions, and the strangeness-to-entropy ratio are presented as well.